Mayor said he would have blocked Rivington deal if he'd known

Mayor Bill de Blasio said he never would have allowed a nursing home to turn into luxury condos had his administration informed him of the land use deal.

The agency that oversaw the deal apparently never told anyone in City Hall when it allowed the deed to the property to be changed in late 2015, spokeswoman Karen Hinton said.

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And his first deputy mayor, Tony Shorris, did not inform him in February when he first learned the city was freezing deed restriction changes.

“As far as I know, no one in [the] mayor’s office knew about the lifting of the deed restriction in 2015 except, of course, the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services general counsel who signs off in a very pro forma way,” Hinton added.

She also said Shorris wanted to gather all the facts before presenting the situation to the mayor.

The controversy involves the city’s highest-grossing lobbyist, a mystery about the conversion of a health center to high-end condos and an obscure land use process. It is also a source of frustration for a mayor who, by all accounts, strives to be deeply involved in the workings of his administration. (Many describe him as a micromanager.)

Asked on Monday whether he would have preferred city officials to keep him informed about the deal, the mayor replied, “If they had informed me I would’ve said 'don’t do it,' so the answer is yes.”

Without naming individuals, he questioned the judgment of the deal.

“Someone should’ve said 'no' farther down the food chain and if they didn’t know how, they should’ve come to me and I would’ve said no very quickly,” he said.

Hinton said that the city's Community Affairs Unit began to hear about concerns about the issue from Community Board 3, but, she said, "no one understood the implications fully until late February."

The issue in question, which is being probed by the city’s Department of Investigation, involves the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) signing off on a deal with a private developer to change the use of a 150,000-square-foot building on Rivington Street in Manhattan.

The Allure Group paid $16 million in November, 2015, to remove all restrictions of use tied to the property known as “Rivington House,” which it had purchased earlier that year from a nonprofit group that provided residence to AIDS patients.

Three months later, Allure, a for-profit nursing home provider, sold it to Slate Property Group, which intends to build condos.

City officials have said they feel Allure duped them by indicating in an email in late 2014 it wanted to “keep the home as it is.” But by the time Allure requested the deed be changed again, in April of 2015, it made no such commitment in a three-sentence email to DCAS.

For a mayor who has been described by numerous advisors and staffers as a micromanager who circulates “decision-memos” requiring the sign-off of multiple top aides before making major decisions, the issue has called into question his oversight of city agencies.

De Blasio on Monday acknowledged his style, while four current and former aides said it is unrealistic to expect him to be abreast of every administrative detail.

“If there was a decision memo on this one, it would’ve never happened,” said one former aide, who would only speak on background. “Agencies make thousands of ministerial decisions a year. Can’t see them all.”

De Blasio said he is “very proud of being a hands-on leader” and indicated this experience will encourage an even more-centralized approach to governing the city.

“What this is further evidence of is when in doubt on something that’s truly consequential … people in agencies should seek the guidance of City Hall and if it something important they should come to me as well,” he said.

The mayor has said the city may sue Allure.

Joel Landau, an executive at Allure who requested the deed change, has not returned repeated calls for comment. His name was dropped from the company’s website over the weekend.

The circumstances surrounding the removal of the deed restriction for Rivington House appear to be something of an anomaly, even in the context of an already very rarely used land use process.

Over the past two years, the city has approved just eight deed restriction removals for nonprofits, LLCs and private individuals, but the $16 million fee paid by Allure was far higher than any other fee in recent years.

The process is so rare because it only applies to properties that were once city-owned.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the city struggled financially, many formerly city-owned parcels and buildings, such as Rivington House, were sold.

The city often attempted to exert some influence over the building or land’s future use by inserting a deed restriction, guaranteeing a specific use, such as for health care.

In 2015, the Dance Theatre of Harlem, a nonprofit company, received approval from the city to lift a restriction on a piece of vacant land the dance company owned that required the land be used as a nonprofit. The dance company paid the city an $875,000 fee to lift the restriction. An attorney for the nonprofit declined to comment.

In November of 2015, a yeshiva in Crown Heights received approval from the city to remove a deed restriction requiring the property be used for a nonprofit, educational purpose, for which it paid the city a $150,000 fee. The yeshiva’s administrators did not respond to a request for comment.

Another deed restriction removal request was granted in 2015 for the family of a Scarsdale doctor and his wife who were indicted that year on charges they were running a $77 million pill mill. A group of the doctor’s family members paid the city $900,000 to remove a restriction on a parcel of vacant, non-residential land on the Upper East Side that required the property to be used by a nonprofit.